Consult Carson 8/28: “My sales team is bilingual and I’m not – how do I effectively coach them?”
From today’s mailbag: “My sales team is bilingual and I’m not. How do I successfully coach them on transactions and best utilize their talents?”
Carson: It’s quite a unique situation when a fair amount of your employees’ transactions can not be adequately monitored and critiqued. Furthermore, your employees can carry on full conversations that you are not privy to (yet, if you think about it, they can do this while you’re not there as well). Finally, your team possesses skills that make them even more valuable because they have the ability to communicate with more customers thanks to their knowledge of different tongues. It’s a three-pronged possibility.
1. Coaching transactions: In the early going of the aforementioned environment, your primary challenges in coaching will be when your team members are speaking with customers in the language you do not know. As they are bilingual, you will be privy to the conversations in your native tongue, which will likely be the basis of your early deductions of their sales and service process. While your sampling of their transactions may be smaller and margin of error on your conclusions higher, you will still have some metrics to go on. Much of sales leadership is the ability to drive metrics through coaching your team’s understanding of why they are important and how to achieve them. The fundamentals are the same: you must discern what makes your team tick, what their goals are and your role in guiding them and helping them achieve these accolades. As you continue to work with your team, it’s also hopeful and likely that leaders will emerge – leaders you can trust. As a bilingual leader emerges that you can delegate to and whom you can entrust the responsibility of coaching and critiquing the transactions in other languages, you not only strengthen your team through appointing additional leaders but you can plug any gaps that exist in your coaching process because of your lack of understanding of a language they speak.
2. Trust. It’s my philosophy that if your employee earned the right to be in the position they are in, which you decided upon hire or promotion, that it falls upon them to utilize the training and coaching they receive to perform the job the way they see fit. It’s rare, and not even preferable, that our sales personnel will conduct themselves precisely as we do. It requires trust on our part. When your employees can also carry on whole conversations literally while you are in the room that you cannot understand, it could require even more trust. That said, like parenting or being in a relationship of any kind, we control what we can: the interactions with our team, the coaching and training we disseminate and the effort we put in to eliminating obstacles to their success and helping them develop the tools and talents that will further their career. The language barrier cannot deter your willingness and desire to work on behalf of your team. Allow your team to grow and flourish – you have a diverse team whose abilities to transcend language barriers and help a larger group of customers will actually yield far more positives in the face of the challenges. Your team will actually respect you even more as you show your trust of them on their transactions, and you will have measurable data to show that they either are or are not conducting their transactions as effectively as they should be. Finally, you can still ask them to give you a rundown of the sales conversations you cannot understand – what did they glean from their fact-finding, what was the customer response and why did they decline the product or any attachments? It won’t be a perfect science, but nothing in sales ever is.
3. Promotion of your team. Just like the ability to drive sales better than others, the ability to speak multiple languages is a marketable skill that can open additional doors for your team members. It’s up to us as leaders to know our team – what motivates them and where they want to go – and to diagnose their strengths and areas of opportunity. There are often job requisitions that call exclusively for associates who are bilingual. This gives you an added item to assess when you are working with your team on a career path: they have skills which lend to certain roles that you will want to put on their radar. Do you have some of your team members emerging as leaders as we discussed before? Could they benefit your team or division in a larger capacity? Is the bilingual ability something that is prominent in your larger work group, market or division? If so, perhaps your peers are facing similar opportunities and you can work with your peers on solutions that benefit all of you – do you have bilingual peers? Would it benefit you to do so? Make your leaders aware of this potential opportunity in your region and perhaps they can devise a solution that is in everyone’s best interests: the furthering and promotion of your team, the added coaching from a bilingual manager, and you can work together with that manager so you are each adding value to one another’s work.
Your situation of having an entirely or nearly entirely bilingual team is certainly unique, and just as when you have anyone who is uniquely great at their role you harness their strengths and find ways to help them, trust them, promote them and make them more effective. This scenario can certainly be a new one for many, but once you explore and discover new ways of coaching them and you get their feedback on what they need from you to aid in their current role and in getting to their next one, it can be harmonious for all. You need each other; they need your knowledge and support and you need their buy-in to the right way of conducting business. In the end, you can find these things by ensuring you’re speaking the same language: that of teamwork.
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Carson V. Heady posts for “Consult Carson” serving as the “Dear Abby” of sales and sales leadership. You may post any question that puzzles you regarding sales and sales leadership careers: interviewing, the sales process, advancing and achieving. You will also be directly contributing to his third book, “A Salesman Forever.”
Question submissions can be made via LinkedIn to Carson V. Heady, this Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Carson-V-Heady/125078150858064?ref=hl , Twitter via @cvheady007 or e-mail atcvheady007@yahoo.com or you may post an anonymous comment as a reply to my WordPress blog at the bottom of this page:https://carsonvheady.wordpress.com/the-home-of-birth-of-a-salesman-2010-published-by-world-audience-inc-and-the-salesman-against-the-world-2014/
Carson V. Heady has written a book entitled “Birth of a Salesman” that has a unique spin that shows you proven sales principles designed to birth in you the top producer you were born to be.
If you would like to strengthen your sales skills, go to http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICRVMI2/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_yGXKtb0G
